Sustainability is increasingly important to the global economy and geo-politics. As countries issue regulations for carbon “cap and trade” and as consumers reward (or punish) companies for their sustainability practices, it has become more and more important to reduce an enterprise's carbon footprint. The international posts process in excess of 250 billion pieces of mail while commercial enterprises purchase billions of more pieces of hard copy brochures and inserts. Over 211 billion pieces of mail were processed by the United States Postal Service (USPS) in 2007 http://www.usps.com/financials/rpw/welcome.htm Of this volume, the fastest growing sector is the 5.7 billion post card segment (3% of total USPS volume)—post card piece volume grew by 8% despite declines of 2% for First-Class Mail and flat growth of 1% for Standard Mail. Post cards are lighter and easier to process than letters and flats. A lighter mail piece requires less fuel to deliver than a heavier mail piece. Given the international concern about global warming and domestic concern for the sustainability of natural resources, all else being equal it would benefit society to facilitate more mailings of post cards and fewer mailings of letters.
The market for remailable envelopes/forms that allows a sender to send out and get back a DVD, CD or other items such as a survey or a bill has grown dramatically in the last eight years. Companies like NETFLIX mail approximately 1.6 million reuseable envelopes/forms per day from nearly 75,000 different DVD titles. The market demand for remailable envelopes/forms will continue to grow in response to rising material costs and for environmental friendliness concerns (a reuseable envelope can use 25% to 75% less paper than two separate envelopes and is therefore much more environmentally friendly for source reduction advantages and for reducing a mailer's carbon footprint than separate envelopes and inserts so their adoption will potentially help slow the impact of global warming. Typically, however, to facilitate adoption the remailable piece should meet or exceed the United States Postal Service (USPS) and global postal services' automated processing requirements. Failure to meet postal requirements will prevent the adoption of environmentally friendly two-way envelopes. Recent publicity about the USPS having to manually sort the 1.6 million red remailable pieces per day (at a cost of $21 million per year) for a popular DVD/CD mailer in the US is further illustrating the need to develop USPS compliant remailable envelopes that function properly on the USPS automation equipment (otherwise, the environmental benefits are lost to more expensive manual processes).
A number of bill payers (and bill senders) appreciate the “touch points” that come from the company enclosing coupons, vouchers, special offers, surveys, etc. inside the envelope with the invoice which helps build brand identity—consumers and companies benefit from the exchange of relevant information, coupons, surveys, or other offers via the mail stream. However, although electronic processing of bill payments has proven to be dramatically less expensive than the processing of physical checks, not all consumers welcome electronic bill payment either because of the fear of identity theft on the web or because of the fear there would be insufficient funds in their bank account at the time of a scheduled transaction.
Identity theft costs the US economy over $45 billion dollars per year in 2007 and effects approximately 3% of the adult population, or 9 million people, according to a recent Javelin Strategy & Research Paper published Feb. 11, 2008 (which is funded by CheckFree, now part of Fiserv, Inc., Visa Inc, and Wells Fargo). The average cost per consumer for identity theft was $691 in 2007, about 25% higher than 2006, per the same study. Recent advancement in contactless credit cards, gift cards, transit and security systems based on RFID technology, particularly at the 13.56 MHz frequency per ISO Standard 14443, could be a boom to industry for reducing transaction costs and a boom to consumers for its ease of use (no swipe, just proximity activated); however, US consumers are already concerned about identity theft and with RFID technology comes a greater risk of identity theft and security breaches since unauthorized scanners can “read” the card data without physical contact.